The present invention relates to and more particularly to devices and methods for interfacing a single sensor unit requiring an excitation signal with multiple data processing units.
In many instrumentation systems it is required to simultaneously provide data from a single sensor unit to multiple data processing functions. Further, it is often necessary to externally furnish an excitation signal to the sensor unit and for certain applications such as for avionics systems, it is required that instrumentation systems function with high reliability. The problem of furnishing a proper excitation signal is complicated by the reliability requirements for the system since any fault in providing the excitation signal to the sensor may subsequently result in multiple data processing functions being affected. The obvious solution would appear to be to provide multiple sensor units but this is frequently not possible due to space and cost limitations.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a fault-tolerant system for interfacing a single sensor unit requiring an external excitation signal with multiple data centralization units which feed information to multiple data processing functions.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a fault-tolerant system for interfacing a single sensor unit to multiple data centralization units which is not dependent on a single excitation signal from a single source and which allows the other data centralization units and the sensor unit to continue functioning despite the breakdown of one or more of the data centralization units.
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a fault-tolerant system for interfacing a single sensor unit with multiple data centralization units that is fault-tolerant yet is simple to implement and is economic to construct.